Dale Frank, SABCO PEROXIDE

For decades Dale Frank’s practice has been motivated by an experimental approach to painting, his honed manipulations of the medium testing the technical, conceptual and perceptual limits of his materials. Charged concoctions of varnish, lighter fluid and Penetrol on perspex invoke explosive and lustrous images reminiscent of celestial planes and interstellar landscapes. Will Gosling has described how Dale Frank’s “chromatic arrangements are metaphysical universes referring as much to the spirit and to emotions as to physical spaces.”[1] Yet the potency of Frank’s compositions extend beyond the picture plane, his titles extricating volatile fragments of language, before fusing them together to illuminate their absurd ponderance.

While his controlled exploitation of varnish occupied much of the artist’s focus over the last decade, SABCO PEROXIDE highlights Frank’s long-standing exploration of forms of installation, performance and sculpture. Frank describes the gesture of contemporary painting as a “conceptual practice, first by what it is not, and what it opposes.”[2] In this spirit, Frank’s 26th exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery investigates the very edge of painting, as explosive oxygenated sculptures of compression foam and eruptive reconfigurations of readymade designer furniture, are positioned alongside paintings that protrude or dissolve, opening onto an almost sculptural, 3-dimensional space. SABCO PEROXIDE is thus an articulation of Frank’s broader conceptual hypotheses, and his ongoing empirical investigations into the potentiality of painting.